FROM GOD’S PERSPECTIVE
“But when God, who set me apart from my mother’s womb and called me by His grace, was pleased to reveal His Son in me so that I might preach Him among the Gentiles, my immediate response was not to consult with human beings. I did not go up to Jerusalem to see those who were apostles before I was, but I went into Arabia. Later I returned to Damascus.” Galatians 1:15-17.
Why was Paul giving such a detailed description of his life history? Somewhere along the line it was not only his gospel message that was being attacked but also his credentials as an apostle. After all, he was not one of the Twelve. Who gave him authority to preach what he preached and, what’s more, to call down a curse on anyone who preached anything different from his message?
And what a message! He was actually insisting that people abandon the Law of Moses as a way to be accepted by God, and embrace and worship a human being as God, and one who had been executed by the Roman authorities because He claimed to be God. That did not sit well with the Jews. On top of that, he was inviting Gentiles to have a share in the covenant God made with Abraham, telling them that they were also Abraham’s offspring if they believed in Jesus.
From a Jewish point of view, what Paul was doing was outrageous. However, although he was a Jew, he had another perspective, one that overrode human opinion. What was God’s side of the story?
First, God had a plan. Paul’s early life as a fanatical Pharisee, far from being his chosen way of life, was only an interlude and a preparation for the destiny God had prepared for him before he was born. At the precise moment, Jesus broke into his life in a personal encounter which shook him loose from his presuppositions and set him on course for his life work – introducing the rest of humanity to the God who had already revealed Himself to one group of people.
Paul had gone about it the wrong way because he did not understand the truth but his encounter with Jesus put him right. God was not fazed by his foolish notions and bad behaviour. He was a product of his times, but He did not leave him to perish in his unbelief. Grace stepped in at the critical moment, opened his eyes and turned him around.
Paul had a lot of unlearning to do. Instead of getting it second-hand from the ones who had spent time with Jesus, he set off by himself to learn first-hand from the Master. Where better to be alone with Him than in the desert of Arabia, where his ancestors had had many encounters with the pre-incarnate Son during their forty-year sojourn in the wilderness?
Paul spent three years – the same amount of time as the other disciples – learning to be a disciple; his own desert “Bible College”, person-to-person with Jesus. It’s no wonder he was so insistent that he had authority to preach what he preached! No one spends time alone with Jesus for that long without being transformed from the inside out, thoroughly purged of all the old wrong thinking. What you think, you become. Paul became an apostle, called, and commissioned, for the rest of his life, to be an ambassador for the kingdom of God and for his King.
Notice how he said, “to reveal His Son in me”. The years in Arabia were much more than a time of changing the way Paul thought. They were also a time for changing his attitudes and responses so that he became a completely new man. He spent three years “contemplating the Lord’s glory.” Jesus did not sit down on a rock beside him and teach him his spiritual ABC. By His Holy Spirit He was in him, revealing and leading him into all truth, making real and becoming to him “Christ in me, the hope of glory.”
When Paul left the “sacred halls of learning”, not in a classroom or lecture hall in an esteemed institution, but under the wide-open sky, he carried with him much more than knowledge. He carried in him the presence of the Son of God, both his tutor and his model. It’s no wonder that he was so adamant about the truth of his gospel. The author was resident within him, guiding him and speaking through him so that it was always and only truth that he presented to anyone who would listen.
Acknowledgement
Scripture taken from THE HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION®, NIV® Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.® Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.